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Repetitive strain

In the wake of Michael Haneke joining that exclusive group of directors who have twice been awarded the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or prize, it may be an odd time to bemoan the lot of the auteur. (Haneke won first for The White Ribbon and on Sunday for Amour.) But beyond the bubble of the international festival circuit, auteur may have dropped in cultural value, even as (or perhaps because) the usefulness of the director as a commodity is now apparent to the major studios. When a blockbuster is sold using a director’s name to evoke familiarity (“From Michael Bay, the guy who ripped you off last summer…”), is it a bastardisation of the auteurist line pushed originally by André Bazin at Revue de Cinéma, or the perfectly logical co-opting of art by commerce? Marketing departments are surely only taking the credo mapped out by auteurist critics, and wringing out every last dollar.

That’s the commercial branch of auteur theory, and it’s one that has been growing ever since Steven Spielberg’s heyday. But some of the places where auteurs were once welcomed have been pulling down the shutters—or perhaps moving the goalposts is a more appropriate metaphor. In the Guardian this week, Hadley Freeman devoted 1000 words to complaining that Wes Anderson and Tim Burton had, with their latest films, been caught repeating themselves. I can’t comment on Burton’s Dark Shadows, which I haven’t seen, but I feel strongly that Anderson has found new vim and inspiration in Moonrise Kingdom. However, it is not Freeman’s specific argument that I found interesting so much as the general tendency to take traits once celebrated as auteurist (a recognisable voice, a continuity of theme, a discernible visual style, a repertory company of actors) and to use them as a stick to beat those auteurs we find lacking.

It’s a thin line between a director who produces a different meal each time from the same set of ingredients, and one who reheats the leftovers. And it’s a danger, I think, that we can mistake consistency for complacency when we can’t quite express what it is about a film that displeases us. Not admiring Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver or Broken Embraces, I concluded that the filmmaker’s familiar conventions must have inhibited him, reducing to the mechanical what had once been sensual. Why didn’t I feel the same way about the director’s latest movie, The Skin I Live In? It could just as easily have been the case that this one was gripping and dramatically persuasive, while the others were not—and that the qualities of the auteur had borne the brunt of my disapproval in the case of the earlier films, while enhancing my enjoyment in the latter example.

Auteur theory has always had its dissenters, be they critics (Pauline Kael: “Just because a director repeats himself, doesn’t make him talented”), screenwriters (William Goldman, upon first being told about auteur theory, asked: “What’s the punchline?”) or directors themselves (Fred Schepisi: “The word ‘auteur’ just denigrates everyone else’s job”). Even some of those who encouraged auteur theory came to harbour reservations, such as Andrew Sarris, who said : “I think it’s gone too fat now. Every director has to show his wild visual style in order to establish himself and blaze a trail immediately.”

The greatest damage was surely done to the careers of those who were not among the cherished favourites of the original auteurist critics. In Sight & Sound in July 1997, Ginette Vincendeau put into perspective the hypocrisy of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd, which included future filmmakers such as Godard, Truffaut and Rohmer. She writes:

“While the craft of popular Hollywood filmmaking was celebrated, that of French mainstream directors (as well as scriptwriters) was derided. The politique des auteurs recognised that for Hawks, Hitchcock or Ford it was possible to inscribe personal themes in films produced within ‘the system’—but within the French ‘system’, no such possibility was acknowledged.”

No need to shed any tears, then, for the auteurs or their supporters: only for those left unfairly in the cold. Perhaps auteur theory isn’t a school of thought so much as a shelter in which critics and audiences can seek sanctuary when necessary, while reserving the right to trash the place and spray-paint its walls whenever the mood takes them.

Ryan Gilbey is the New Statesman's film critic. He is also the author of It Don't Worry Me (Faber), about 1970s US cinema, and a study of Groundhog Day in the "Modern Classics" series (BFI Publishing). He was named reviewer of the year in the 2007 Press Gazette awards.

Leader: The unresolved Eurozone crisis

The eurozone crisis was never resolved. It was merely conveniently forgotten. The vote for Brexit, the terrible war in Syria and Donald Trump’s election as US president all distracted from the single currency’s woes. Yet its contradictions endure, a permanent threat to continental European stability and the future cohesion of the European Union.

The resignation of the Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, following defeat in a constitutional referendum on 4 December, was the moment at which some believed that Europe would be overwhelmed. Among the champions of the No campaign were the anti-euro Five Star Movement (which has led in some recent opinion polls) and the separatist Lega Nord. Opponents of the EU, such as Nigel Farage, hailed the result as a rejection of the single currency.

An Italian exit, if not unthinkable, is far from inevitable, however. The No campaign comprised not only Eurosceptics but pro-Europeans such as the former prime minister Mario Monti and members of Mr Renzi’s liberal-centrist Democratic Party. Few voters treated the referendum as a judgement on the monetary union.

To achieve withdrawal from the euro, the populist Five Star Movement would need first to form a government (no easy task under Italy’s complex multiparty system), then amend the constitution to allow a public vote on Italy’s membership of the currency. Opinion polls continue to show a majority opposed to the return of the lira.

But Europe faces far more immediate dangers. Italy’s fragile banking system has been imperilled by the referendum result and the accompanying fall in investor confidence. In the absence of state aid, the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, could soon face ruin. Italy’s national debt stands at 132 per cent of GDP, severely limiting its firepower, and its financial sector has amassed $360bn of bad loans. The risk is of a new financial crisis that spreads across the eurozone.

EU leaders’ record to date does not encourage optimism. Seven years after the Greek crisis began, the German government is continuing to advocate the failed path of austerity. On 4 December, Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, declared that Greece must choose between unpopular “structural reforms” (a euphemism for austerity) or withdrawal from the euro. He insisted that debt relief “would not help” the immiserated country.

Yet the argument that austerity is unsustainable is now heard far beyond the Syriza government. The International Monetary Fund is among those that have demanded “unconditional” debt relief. Under the current bailout terms, Greece’s interest payments on its debt (roughly €330bn) will continually rise, consuming 60 per cent of its budget by 2060. The IMF has rightly proposed an extended repayment period and a fixed interest rate of 1.5 per cent. Faced with German intransigence, it is refusing to provide further funding.

Ever since the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi, declared in 2012 that he was prepared to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the single currency, EU member states have relied on monetary policy to contain the crisis. This complacent approach could unravel. From the euro’s inception, economists have warned of the dangers of a monetary union that is unmatched by fiscal and political union. The UK, partly for these reasons, wisely rejected membership, but other states have been condemned to stagnation. As Felix Martin writes on page 15, “Italy today is worse off than it was not just in 2007, but in 1997. National output per head has stagnated for 20 years – an astonishing . . . statistic.”

Germany’s refusal to support demand (having benefited from a fixed exchange rate) undermined the principles of European solidarity and shared prosperity. German unemployment has fallen to 4.1 per cent, the lowest level since 1981, but joblessness is at 23.4 per cent in Greece, 19 per cent in Spain and 11.6 per cent in Italy. The youngest have suffered most. Youth unemployment is 46.5 per cent in Greece, 42.6 per cent in Spain and 36.4 per cent in Italy. No social model should tolerate such waste.

“If the euro fails, then Europe fails,” the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has often asserted. Yet it does not follow that Europe will succeed if the euro survives. The continent that once aspired to be a rival superpower to the US is now a byword for decline, and ethnic nationalism and right-wing populism are thriving. In these circumstances, the surprise has been not voters’ intemperance, but their patience.